Pin technologies you can currently research by performing actions (ie not in a lab)

BEEFE · Post by **BEEFE** » Mon Nov 11, 2024 9:54 pm

TL;DR

I want the UI to show me plainly if I can currently research technologies by crafting or mining.

What?

Concept art of someone who just landed on Vulcanus, with the first technologies pinned to the UI:

: pinned technologies.png (24.38 KiB) Viewed 74 times

It should on by default, but toggleable for anyone who already knows what they're doing. In-progress achievements are already pinnable in the upper left, so that seems like a good spot to put it.

Why?

Landing on a new planet is already really disorienting, and the tech tree has gotten big enough that it's non-trivial to find something specific. On both Vulcanus and Gleba I had several moments early on where I was like "wait, what am I trying to do here?" and I thought I'd hit a bug when crafting Tungsten Carbide failed to unlock foundries because I hadn't yet mined calcite. Pinning crucial early technologies to the UI makes it much more clear what, if anything, you still need to do before moving on from those first steel furnaces to the world's unique crafting tree.